Thursday, 9 November 2017

Conflict at Christmas

There, I said
it, the C word. Christmas.

I had hoped
to avoid even thinking about it till at least November but it is not to be.

The trigger
for this blog was having a friend talk to me about how much she was dreading
her company’s Christmas ‘do’ because of one particular person she continually
ends up arguing with. She was already anticipating the conflict.

What Happens?

Conflict and
Christmas do seem to go hand in hand. Naturally, a lot of the difficulties
people have are with their own families but increasingly, the additional
stresses and pressures at Christmas seem to tip people over the edge and they
can be really grumpy at work, taking out their frustrations and anxieties on
their colleagues.

Sound
familiar?

Here’s the
interesting bit….conflict at Christmas is usually because you haven’t dealt
with stuff before the fateful date. Like right now, before it gets too crazy.
The same goes for conflict in the workplace; the longer you delay dealing with
it, the worse it’s going to be when it does finally come out into the open.

One of the
main problems with conflict is what I call the ‘festering phase’. Here’s how it
works: something happens that you don’t like or upsets you. You wait for an
apology or some acknowledgement that there’s a problem. You don’t say anything.

But you do
fester. You replay whatever it is that happened. Over and over and over
again. You think about what you did say
and what you might have said. Over and over and over again. You think about
what’s wrong with the other person and what they need to do to make it all all
right. Over and over and over again.

The
‘festering phase’ can last anywhere from a couple of minutes to the rest of
your life.

What I’m
interested in is what happens in the lead up to the conflict. If that can
change then you don’t have to enter a ‘festering phase’ – you might even be
able to head towards a ‘resolution phase’. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why It Happens.

In our vast
experience of running Conflict Management and Assertiveness courses, we know
that people fall into the same old patterns of behaviour they’ve always done
(on both sides, mind you) so that the conflict becomes inevitable.

Is there one
person with whom you seem to engage in conflict often? Are there types of
conflict situations that repeat themselves? Once you have a good beady-eyed
look, you ‘should’ be able to detect patterns. It could be anything, couldn’t
it?

For instance,
you say something, someone else takes offence, you try to defend yourself, the
other person doesn’t want to hear your defences and you’re into conflict.

It could be
someone asks you to do something, you don’t want to, they start putting
pressure on you, you push back, they push back harder and you’re into conflict.

Once you can
unpick the pattern, you have an opportunity to change it.

This, of
course, means that one of you will have to do something different in order to
break the pattern, and guess what? It’s
going to have to be you if you want to at least kick-start a new way of
communicating.

How?

Obviously,
I’d need about 10 blogs to really go into this in any detail, so I’ll give you
one suggestion for now.

Mind-sets get
us into trouble and they can equally help us get out of trouble, even before it
begins. Like the woman I mentioned at the beginning of this blog who’s dreading
her company’s Christmas ‘do’, lots of us anticipate conflict – we know it’s
most likely inevitable and yet we can’t see a way of avoiding it other than
avoiding the situation, which isn’t going to alter anything.

Thus a change
of mind-set is needed. Think of that really difficult person or scenario. Think
about what rubs you up the wrong way, what do they say or do that ‘gets your
goat’? I bet that even doing that might trigger an old ‘festering phase’ as you
replay old conflicts.

Now see if
you can identify that one point of conflict, what could be called the point of
no return, the point at which you are both playing out the same old patterns of
behaviour. Get really specific: what you were thinking, feeling and saying;
what was the other person saying and how were they behaving?

Here’s where
the shift in mind-set can happen – the bit right before the point of no
return. The new mind-set that says,
“Walk away now.” The mind-set that says, “How can I respond differently this
time?” The mind-set that says, “I don’t have to engage in any dispute with this
person. So what if they rub me up the wrong way? That’s my problem, not theirs.”

Changing a
mind-set rarely happens all at once. The trick is to start anticipating
potential conflict not as inevitable but as a chance for you to practise new
behaviour. Rather than replaying conflict after the fact with what you could
have said, start practising right now what you could say differently that will
change the dynamic between you.

Have a go and
you just might make life at Christmas (or any time really) a lot less fraught
and a lot more peaceful.